


The Space Between Stars

by TryingToBe



Series: parallel character studies [3]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Gen, Happy Ending, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Jemma Simmons-centric, Skye | Daisy Johnson-centric, deals with themes of misogyny, talks about 5x14, trauma from hive
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-28
Updated: 2021-02-28
Packaged: 2021-03-12 15:41:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29761884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TryingToBe/pseuds/TryingToBe
Summary: If Jemma followed the rules, then the world made more sense and everything felt safer. Daisy broke all of the rules.-A study of Daisy and Jemma, friendship and love
Relationships: Jemma Simmons & Skye | Daisy Johnson
Series: parallel character studies [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2164725
Comments: 17
Kudos: 22





	The Space Between Stars

**Author's Note:**

> So a few things  
> I didn’t originally intend this to be romantic Skimmons but I couldn't resist certain things so it probably comes across like that in parts, but it still follows canon.  
> Some criticism of FitzSimmons leaks through in parts. I tried to keep it minimal because the focus is on Jemma.  
> If anyone has read my other fics, I'm sorry I keep bringing up 5x14, but it keeps being relevant. I'm trying to approach it from a different angle every time but yeah, it's there. Same with Trip's death which I will never be over. I blame the writers lol  
> Okay! Hope you enjoy!

Once upon a time there was a princess.

She lived in a white ivory tower.

She lived in a field of asphalt flowers.

She lived in a very strange world.

It was a world full of things she was not allowed to touch, places she was not allowed to be, and space she was not allowed to occupy. And she thought that was odd. The way she was brought into this world that clearly did not want her. Not really. Not _her_. But she wants to understand this new strange life she finds herself living. So she looks around, and she explores. She does it in secret. She observes from a distance. She makes herself small, small, small. She makes herself invisible. She makes herself a chameleon. She makes herself everything for everyone.

Because that is what she is supposed to do. Isn’t it?

Because maybe then they will want her. Won’t they?

And she will give, give, give, pieces of herself. Until she fades away into the flat pages of a book.

Once upon a time there was a princess.

A smart, determined, brave princess.

She left her field and followed the chalk white lines on the sidewalk.

She left her tower to go on an adventure into the unknown.

Jemma Anne Simmons had a music box, when she was a child.

Her father gives it to her to help her sleep at night. She puts it by her bedside, she hugs a pillow to her chest, she stares at the projections of stars on her wall, and she listens to its tune over and over again. Inside the box is a ballerina. The ballerina wears a white tutu and she turns around and around as the music plays.

All the bad feelings get put inside the box, out of sight. She puts a lock on it so that no one will get in. And everything bad stays there.

Until one day the box was so full it shook open from the force of its own energy and everything came pouring out to the surface.

Daisy Louise Johnson had a blanket, when she was a baby.

Her mother gives it to her and she wraps her up and holds her in her arms and rocks her back and forth. The fabric is soft. It covers her whole body.

When monsters attack that is how they find her after- underneath a blanket with blood splattered on her face but not a drop on the fabric. She is kept in the blanket until she is left on the doorstep of an orphanage. And when she outgrows it the nuns reuse it for another baby, and then another, and another.

When she grows up, Daisy wears long sleeves pulled past her knuckles with holes cut out for her thumbs so as to protect as much of herself as possible.

When Jemma was young she had scoliosis. And so she spends most of July gazing up at the night sky and staring with wonder and awe at all of the stars. Her favorite is Theta Serpentis, a triple star system in the constellation of Serpens. She likes this constellation because it is divided into two parts and neither touch the other, and that seems like a good feature for a constellation to have. Because when two stars collide, they either merge into a blue straggler, or they fade away into hydrogen gas.

Jemma’s father tells her about the stars, and when he speaks, she listens. They talk a lot, but somehow they never really understand each other.

When Jemma goes to sleep she has a wild dream that she is up among the stars. And she is never alone.

Mary gazes up into the smoggy air and when she squints during the night, sometimes she can catch a glimpse of the stars in the sky. It is on one of these nights, a cold oddly clear September night, that Mary decides her name is Sky.

The next day when she goes to school, she writes it down on her classwork assignment. She adds an ‘e’ at the the end to make it Skye because she likes how that looks. Skye, no last name. But that is fine. She doesn’t need a family name. No really, she doesn’t. She has public wi-fi and she has internet friends, and sometimes, when she is lucky, she even has the stars.

“Call me Skye,” she says. And she smiles in defiance.

Skye learns very quickly that with each new family there are new rules that must be followed.

That is the first thing they do when she gets there, they tell her the rules. She doesn’t really understand why there have to be so many. So many that they land in her head and crash into each other and she can’t seem to hold them there because they don’t make any sense. She tries to follow them, at first. But she gets sent back anyway.

She is never good enough. But that is fine. She is fine.

But she wants more. She wants to be a part of something. She wants to feel like in the whole puzzle that is the universe, her piece isn’t so insignificant after all. That her piece has a good place to fit.

Jemma learns very early on that no one ever tells you the rules, you are supposed to just know them. (And how was it that everyone else seemed to just know them?)

She doesn’t really understand this, but she is a scientist. So she will observe, and she will experiment, and she will learn them all. And even if she doesn’t really _get_ them, she will at least _have_ them there in front of her, for reference.

And that is good enough. That is fine. She is fine.

Jemma likes knowing. It makes her feel better. It makes her feel like there is order in the world. Everything has a place to be, and she can put everything in its place.

When Jemma is seven years old she decides she wants to study cuttlefish. You see, cuttlefish are fascinating because of their chromatophores. They contain pigment sacs that expand under the skin when the nerve causes the radial muscle fibers to pull outward. Jemma thinks that is a useful feature. Because the ocean is a dangerous place, with unfathomable depths. And blending in, becoming invisible, that seems like a good way not to die. She observes from a distance, you see.

Seven years later, a 14 year old Jemma pursues her Biology PhD and studies the characterization and biosynthesis of lipids in Paulinella micropora MYN1. Structural and metabolic data indicate that the chromatophore of Paulinella is a special form of organelle, suggested by the lack of an outer membrane corresponding to the chloroplast outer envelope.

Overall, this work is not quite as relevant to what she wants to study as her Biochemistry PhD work on CREB function in the CA1 region of the dorsal hippocampus. As it turns out, increasing CREB specifically in this region rescues spatial memory deficits in Tg mice.

But Jemma feels the seven year old girl who wanted to study chromatophores is inside her still, smiling.

At 17 years old Jemma completes her PhDs. Her parents show up to her exit seminars. They have no idea what she is talking about, but they are so proud.

When Skye is seven years old she is still called Mary and she knows more about the bible than she knows about biology. By the time she is 14 she is called Skye and she has been in nine different schools and is failing out for no apparent reason. Somehow she stumbles upon a hacking competition for high schoolers. It seems interesting. She has no preparation. She’s never hacked anything before. She’s never even done any computer programing before. But she figures, what the hell.

The first problem says this:

At the end of this sequence of instructions, how many bytes separate esp and the stored return address on the program’s stack?  
Assume that we call this function using standard 32-bit x86 calling conventions.  
804847c functionname:  
80487c: push %ebp  
80487d: mov %esp,%ebp  
80487f: sub $0x70,%esp  
8048482: movl $0x0,0x4(%esp)  
804848a: movl $0x804850,(%esp)

Okay. Well, Skye has literally no idea what any of that means. But the problem is only five points, so it’s not supposed to be hard. And there is a reference link about related material. Some quick reading gives her some background info. She determines this is some function and a 4 byte return address is stored above it. The push statement adds 4 bytes for the buffer size. The sub allocates another hex 0x70 bytes. So adding that gives her the answer in hex. A quick conversion to decimal gives her 116. Okay. Next problem.

She goes through the rest of the problems until she finishes. She gets second in the contest and she thinks, _that was fun_. She wants to do more of that. And really, who needs school when you have the internet.

That is when Skye learns what hacking is. Hacking is using a system in a way that it wasn’t intended for, in a way that is unexpected. And it turns out Skye excels at this.

A few years later at 17 years old, Skye hacks into the Pentagon on a bet. That is when she realizes, she’s really good at this. Hackers are always trying to find their way into locked places, and Skye could find any exploit. The only thing she could never seem to find, was herself.

Jemma Simmons is a scientist.

And after her first paper is published, she looks at her name where it is listed as Simmons, A. Jemma. She likes how that looks, last name first, first name last, middle name hidden. It means she has gotten work done.

After she gets her PhDs, she is invited to give a talk. The host speaks first, and he introduces her as Miss Simmons, instead of Dr. Simmons.

“Just Simmons,” she says. And that is fine. Call her Simmons, because she is a scientist but she doesn’t have time to prove it to anyone. She has work to do.

Jemma has rules to follow. Science makes sense to her in this way. It follows an order. It starts with a question. Then a hypothesis. A study design. Data collection. Data analysis. More questions. And so on and so on. And she likes that. Because she gets to explore and she gets to wonder and she gets to be curious and free, but she gets to do it all in an orderly way. There is a system. And it has never failed her.

“Why are you like this?” soon to be Agent Tad asks her one day in mild exasperation at her antics.

The answer was a simple logical conditional.

If Jemma followed the rules, then the world made more sense.

And everything felt safer.

(Daisy broke all of the rules.)

One day Skye is returned to the orphanage from a particularly miserable foster family.

Her friend Matt frowns at her, his head tilted to the side as he considers her. “What happened?” he asks.

Skye shrugs. “Broke the rules. Got punished.”

Matt hears what she isn’t saying. There is a system he knows, and it failed her. “There’s a word for that and it’s not punishment.”

Maybe they thought it would teach her a lesson, but Skye keeps breaking the rules. In fact, she can’t seem to stop herself.

She stays with the Sutter’s when she is sixteen. She likes them. And she wonders if maybe, she is safe there. When she breaks their rules, they don’t punish her, they ask her why.

She looks away. “I just wanted to see if I could.”

A galaxy is a system of stars. Millions or even billions of stars combined with gas and with dust. All held together by the force of their own attraction. And across the entire universe, galaxies collide. Their shape may change from spirals to ellipses or other unusual, irregular forms. Sometimes they simply pass through each other because the stars themselves are separated by so much empty space. But sometimes, the pull of the collision can create a shock and friction so strong that it ignites the formation of entirely new stars.

When Skye and Jemma first meet it is a collision of order and chaos, caution and disregard, impulsivity and preparedness, study and intuition, science and technology, experimentation and exploration.

It is the unexpected beauty of two people who couldn’t be more different, creating a new bond. It is not long before they can’t imagine their life without each other.

It is not long before they get into trouble together.

“I can’t be a part of your bad girl shenanigans!”… “This is actually a bit thrilling!”

Skye thinks Jemma is delightfully ridiculous.

They laugh about it after.

“A gorgeous head?”

“I panicked!”

Skye’s laughter is like music. And for the first time Jemma thinks, _maybe breaking the rules could be fun_.

The first time (they are aware of) that they are exposed to alien genetics, it is after a failure of safety protocols and a lack of an abundance of caution. And Jemma is not really sure when _that_ started, but her curiosity was so strong that approaching a floating body didn’t seem like a bad idea until it was far too late.

Jemma has a choice to make now. Her life or theirs. But the thing is, that’s not really a choice at all.

Jemma is falling, falling, falling through the sky.

And when she lands, it is Skye whose arms are thrown around her, grounding her to safety and holding her together.

Jemma Simmons is not a medical doctor. She is a scientist. She can study, and research, and solve problems. But she is not equipped to save lives, not like this anyway. No one ever taught her how to do _this_.

Jemma excels at preparation. But it turns out, there are some things you cannot prepare for.

Skye’s blood covers the floor, soaks through the fabric of her shirt, stains Jemma’s hands. There is too much blood.

Jemma scrubs and scrubs but she can’t get it off. And she swears right there, that she will do anything to keep this from happening again. To keep her safe.

Skye is not a field agent. Not yet. But she has a chance to stop someone bad before he can hurt more people, and so she takes it. Even though she hasn’t really learned how to do that yet.

She turns around, and pain explodes in her stomach.

Skye excels at improvisation. But maybe there are some things that would be better off with a plan.

She falls, falls, falls to the ground.

And it is Jemma’s hands that take her barely beating heart and hold it together. And when Skye wakes up, she swears that she won’t take that for granted ever again.

“I’m grateful. I hope you know that.”

When Jemma sinks to the bottom of the ocean, she remembers. She remembers a little girl who wanted to study cuttlefish. And that little girl grew up and she studied chromatophores. And she grew up and she studied memory. And now she might not get to grow any more. And she might not get to make any new memories. All because she trusted her feelings instead of examining the complete evidence.

But Jemma doesn’t have time to think about that right now. She has an unsolvable problem to solve before the oxygen runs out. It is a good thing that Jemma excels at creating solutions when there aren’t any.

Skye has a nightmare that she is alone.

On a table inside the base there is a music box. It plays a song that feels so familiar, but she can’t quite place it. There is something comforting about it. Something soft.

When she touches the box it turns her into stone.

Antoine Triplett died by heroism.

He had so much left to offer the world, but the world had nothing to give him. All it could do was take. So he died with love in his heart and lost dreams of what could have been.

He died the footnote of someone else’s story. But he was not bitter about it. And if he had the chance, he would do it all again, only, well, better. He would have kept the door open, he would have dodged the obelisk fragments, he would have done something, anything… (and maybe he would have kissed the girl first, too)

_She_ is bitter though. She is devastated and guilty and terrified. And she thought they had more time. And it was her fault. It was her curiosity, her drive to know, to explore, to understand, to change.

But it was his life that was ended. It was his future that was cut short, his mother that sobbed for him, his children that would never be born. His story that would never be told.

And now she has to live with it, to live without him. And that seems wrong. Because if there was a prince charming in her story, it should have been Trip.

After, all Skye can think is, _It should have been me._ She reached for him, staring. She couldn’t look away. And it is too much. It is all too much. So she shoves it inside so that no one else will get hurt but her.

After, all Jemma can think is, _What if Skye is next?_ And that is too much. She can’t even stand the thought of it. All that is left of him is pieces and she can’t bear the sight of it. This is not something she will ever be able to understand. So she locks it in her box where it can’t hurt her.

Change is constant. Change is terrifying.

“I just want you to be safe, Skye. You know that, right?”

“I do. It means a lot.” It means _everything_.

Skye had a dream that she was never alone. The music was soft and comforting. And she was safe in her home.

She lives in a strange world. It is a world that wants to keep her flat, keep her stagnant, keep her contained. But she has depths they will never touch and power they can never comprehend. And even though she is rooted to the earth, she can still fly to the sky.

“Daisy. My name is Daisy,” she says, proudly.

It is a careless mistake that causes the whole thing. A failure of a poorly designed system without proper safety protocols. And that is devastating in and of itself.

Jemma is pulled into a hole in the fabric of the universe. It does not take long for her to notice that she does not recognize these constellations.

She misses the stars almost as much as she misses the sun. There is nothing on this planet to guide her. Nothing to hope for. No dreams to be had.

Jemma had a dream that she was home safe. And she could stare into the sky and feel nothing but comfort.

Instead, Jemma avoids looking. And out of the corner of her eye, she sees it. It doesn’t have any sort of name. It feels old and pained and haunted. It feels angry and desperate and all consuming. And there is no evidence for what it can do. No way to measure it. There is only fear. It is hunting her. And it doesn’t even look like anything at all.

So she runs and runs and runs away. And in the end, it is Daisy who holds open the door so that she can claw her way to earth.

There is a way to get Jemma back. And Daisy knows what she has to do. There is a piercing pulsing sound. It echos in her head. It rattles in her bones. It feels wrong. It feels heavy. It feels like too much. And it might just kill her.

_No_ , she thinks. _Not yet._ She will hold, hold, hold on. She can do that for Jemma. She could do anything for Jemma.

Jemma holds a knife made out of bone. She holds a gun and she holds her breath until Melinda May teaches her better.

The trick is to breathe. Always keep breathing. (But Jemma thinks there is only one breath of oxygen left and it is not hers to take.)

She keeps breathing anyway. She is fine.

She hands her a hula doll.

“Thought it might be something you’d, well…”

She hands her a vase of daisies.

“You can call me whatever you want.”

And she smiles with joy, with love, with perfect understanding of words unspoken.

They decide to go on a picnic. It has been too long since they have done anything together and they could both use some more sun. So on a day off they head outside the Playground and drive to a park.

Jemma brings the supplies. She spreads out the blanket on the grass and they lie on the ground and gaze up. Daisy pulls out her phone and starts to play music.

And there is no alien planet trying to kill her, no terrorists hunting her, no torture, no violence, no death. There is just the two of them, lying together in this peculiar world that they found themselves living in.

Jemma knew she was not a superhero. Not like Daisy. She couldn’t always be there to save her, but she swore to always keep her safe. So she designs her Quake suit to protect her. She designs the gauntlets to stop her from hurting herself. And she lines the long sleeves with the softest fabric that she can find.

It is not enough.

It is a cruel twist of fate, but saving Jemma has now condemned Daisy. The thing that haunted and hunted her, has come for Daisy too. And Jemma never wanted that.

Hasn’t the world taken enough?

It has a name now. _Hive_.

And it isn’t a shapeless nightmare anymore. Now it looks like a Nazi. After, Daisy decides that was fitting. Because the parasite that scraped her out of her own skull and took her from herself _would_ look like that.

But it didn’t feel like that. It felt good. It felt whole and connected and all consuming and she was desperate for more.

She wants to tear her skin off of her body and scrub away whatever remains with sandpaper.

When Daisy returns home, Melinda May wraps her in a SHIELD jacket and holds her close as she rocks back and forth.

Underneath the jacket is a lost child with a pure heart and an innocent smile. Underneath is a bruised warrior with blood on her hands and tears in her eyes.

She is not fine and no one has any right to expect her to be.

She is bleeding. It seeps through her shirt onto the door behind her.

“I’m sorry. I had no where else to turn.”

Jemma hates this. She has seen enough of Daisy’s blood to last her several lifetimes.

They sit on the floor of the apartment that Daisy got for her and Jemma doesn’t know what she is supposed to say in this situation. She knows what she wants to say. _I wasn’t there and I wanted to be, but you pulled away and you’re not supposed to do that. You’re not supposed to be the one who pulls away._ _Come back, come back, come back home so that I can make sure you are safe._

She covers up her wound. Cleans off the blood.

_I just want you to be safe, Daisy. I thought you knew that._

(She knows. She doesn’t think she deserves it. Because there was only one life that could be left on the earth but it is not hers to live.)

Daisy never wants to forget. She wants to keep every memory, every drop of blood she spilled right on the surface where it belongs. That feels right. That is how it’s supposed to be. Isn’t it?

The truth is, Daisy couldn’t forget even if she wanted to. The memories live throughout her body, in every action and every pause and every vibration. They live inside her head, in her decisions and her doubts. They live inside the spaces of her heart that grew just for them. In every happy smile and gentle embrace. They are alive in her still, even after they are torn away.

Daisy doesn’t want to forget because when she was a baby her mother sang to her softly. And even if she can only remember it as a dream, some part of her knows, can feel, in her bones, in her blood, that once, she was loved.

Jemma loves him. This thing is not him. It’s a decoy. A life model decoy. And she is her. She is herself.

“I’m me. I hope.”

Jemma knows who she is. Doesn’t she?

She wrote it in her head and she assigned it into categories. She gave some to a box, and she gave some to a lab coat, and she gave some to quiet gestures of trust and softness. And where did all of that _go_?

Her instinct is to pull away. Because truthfully, she has no idea what is real. Not really. Not anymore. She needs to see the evidence. She needs proof. Daisy pulls her close. Daisy is real. And Jemma will hold on to this even as she loses everything else.

Daisy turns a corner and walks into a room and she sees a truck full of herself staring creepily back at her. But they are not her.

Daisy knows exactly who she is. She searched and she fought and she bleed and she lost and now she knows. And she would really like for other people to stop taking her for themselves.

Daisy knows who Jemma is, too. She can feel it, and she can prove it. Her instinct is to hold her close. So that is exactly what she does.

Jemma blindly reaches her hand out backwards to Daisy who holds her back.

Jemma races towards her in an alternate reality and they hold each other closely.

She sits down on the floor next to her in a dystopian hell and she helps her tie leather strips around her wrists.

She holds her up as they stumble to freedom.

They cling on to each other. Over and over again. Just the two of them against the world.

Jemma Simmons had a music box. Inside the box was a dancer. She was beautiful. She turned and turned. Inside the box was a bone knife. It was covered in blue blood. It was wrapped in gold fabric and glitter. The music was nothing but white noise.

The box was full, but nobody noticed. Not even her husband. Not until it all came spilling out. And that was the whole point after all, for no one to know.

(Daisy knows. But Daisy also knows what it’s like to lock away pieces of herself, so she never tries to hack in. She just says, “I’m here, when you’re ready.”)

Jemma had a dream that Daisy opened up her music box and fought off all of the monsters and won. Because of course she did.

He cuts a thin surgical line in her neck.

He leaves a trail of blood between two friends.

“Simmons,” she begs, desperate and broken, “help me.”

Jemma Fitzsimmons supports her husband.

Even as he takes a scalpel and slices a line that can never be uncrossed. Even as he does not regret it. And so she pretends that she does not either.

(She will clean up the vomit, and shower off the remorse, and drown out the sounds of tortured screams.)

And when did she decide to do that? She can’t remember.

(A daughter. A daughter with blond hair and blue eyes and dimples and a happy smile who exists in her memories of a dream. That is when she decided.)

And so all the broken sobs and desperate pleas go back. Back in the box, back with the dancer, back where she can’t hear them. And she lets the white noise down out the cries. Everything has a place. And there is no place for that here.

She stands with him through all of it.

Because Jemma Fitzsimmons is a good wife who loves her husband. And that is what a good wife is supposed to do. Because he is pushing himself too hard, and if she is not there for him, she’s afraid something’s going to break.

And no one ever told her that supporting her husband is not the same thing as absolving him.

(No one told her, no one told her, no one ever told her that. Why did no one ever tell her that?)

She always knew that someday she would have to choose. That is the rule, there cannot be space for more.

Daisy never asked anyone to choose her. She never tried to delude herself into thinking they would pick her.

But she asked (she hoped, she begged, she pleaded), that they would love her, too.

(Not instead, not more, never first, just, also…There could be a place for her too. Couldn’t there?)

She doesn’t want to be greedy. She doesn’t want to ask for too much.

That is the one rule she will never break.

But she wished, she dreamed, once upon a time she even prayed. That her family would care about her. That she would be safe with them. And that their hearts would have space to fit hers. And if this strange cruel world were to grant her this wish, she swears she would never ask for anything more. She promises that would be enough.

Jemma understands what love is. Love is sacrifice.

And if the entire world is going to be destroyed, and if her best friend is going to be blamed for it, well, that is romantic. Because she loves him more than anything, and desperation is romantic. That is what all the books said, that the prince would do anything to save the princess. No matter the cost. And it means their love is greater than everything fate could throw at them. It means it is epic. And star crossed.

It means she forgot what it was like to exist before him. She forgot what it was like to look up at the stars and gaze with wonder and awe. That girl is gone. All that is left of her is a music box. A music box and a wedding ring and the dream of a happy dimpled smile.

And there is a cost. She always knew there would be. She always knew she would be the one to pay it. (She never thought Daisy would be, too.) That is the rule. Nothing is ever created or destroyed, after all. For everything built, something else is lost. But no one ever told her it would be herself. No one ever told her that loving someone meant being left with less of her.

But that is just the sacrifice. And that is romantic.

Isn’t it?

Daisy doesn’t think she really understands what love is. All she knows of love is loss. All she knows of love is sacrifice. And that seems wrong. But she _would_ sacrifice. If only they would let her.

He tore a line that can never be uncrossed and he does not regret it. But the thing is, she would have done it if he asked. She would have done anything, _anything_ if they had asked. The problem was, no one asked her.

She would have given, but he decided to take. And now Daisy knows there is not enough of her left to give them. And she needs to keep the last pieces of her for herself.

Jemma tells her to let it go and be okay with it, anyway.

And the thing is, Daisy could do _anything_ for Jemma.

Anything but _that_.

When Daisy Johnson was a baby her mother wrapped her in a blanket. It was soft. The blanket was given away, was lost, was stolen. Because soft things are not allowed in this world. That is the rule. If you want to keep them for yourself you must lock them away.

So Daisy wears long sleeves underneath her leather jacket. And when she can’t, she wraps leather strips around her wrists. And she puts on her gauntlets. She wears her trauma on her skin and her words form the pointed edges of her armor. The chain links are made of anger and bitterness.

It is a lie.

(Underneath the blanket is a lost child with a pure heart and a broken smile.)

She is falling apart at the seams.

And nobody even noticed.

(Jemma noticed. But she put it in her box. And that seemed cruel. Because _he_ was in her box too. But there was nowhere else for her to go. Bad thoughts went into the box- that was the _rule_. And for _once_ , couldn’t Daisy just understand that?)

Jemma Simmons trusts Daisy Johnson. More than anything and anyone. More than herself. Jemma doesn’t always know who she is. She doesn’t always know who her husband is. But she knows who Daisy is. Because Daisy proved it a hundred times over. And if there is a way to save the world, Daisy Johnson will find it. Daisy will do the right thing, and she doesn’t need anyone to tell her what that is. She doesn’t need Jemma. And Jemma can’t be everything for everyone. She can only be everything for him.

Daisy doesn’t know who she is without her family. She needs them. She has lost too much, and if she loses anyone else she doesn’t think she will have anything of herself left. She doesn’t know how they got here, but she cannot get rid of who she is and be only who they need her to be. So now she doesn’t know where they are supposed to go. She digs up her mother’s grave looking for answers and she doesn’t beg god, she begs Jemma. Because if there is a solution to be had, Jemma Simmons will create it.

Jemma Simmons had a husband, before. He is gone now.

And she is alone on the ground. Alone because she held him so closely that they merged together and faded away all at once. So closely that there wasn’t space for anyone else.

But that was a lie. Space is infinite.

The universe is not static, rather, it is expanding. And it isn’t that comets and satellites and galaxies are moving father apart through some predetermined distance, no. It is space itself. The space between grows. And it is speeding up with time.

It is a change as beautiful as it is terrifying. And the only safe passage, is to hold on to something steady.

She finds her in The Lighthouse after. Daisy is sitting on the ground alone. Her legs are pulled up to her chest and her arms are wrapped around them. Her head is on her knees. Jemma approaches her quietly. She takes the blanket she brought and drapes it over Daisy’s shoulders. Daisy stiffens and Jemma retreats at once, backing away. She turns around with a resigned sigh, but then she feels a warm hand tug at her own. Daisy is looking up at her with loss, with heartbreak, with love.

And in an instant, Jemma realizes that all of the confusion, all of the fear, all of the emptiness in the entire universe, was really just the space between two stars.

Jemma sits down next to Daisy as close as she can so that there is no more space between them. And they fit like this. Daisy opens up her arm and wraps the blanket around them both. They each take a corner and hold it together.

Jemma rests her head on Daisy’s shoulder. _I love you, I love you, I love you, and no one ever told me that I was allowed to do that. And I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Because it should have been us against the world. (It should have been us.)_

Daisy rests her head on Jemma’s. _This is enough for me, I promise. You’re my best friend, and you’re enough, just like this._

They go into space together to find Jemma’s husband. So that Jemma can find herself. And that feels right.

Nothing would be okay until she found him. Everything would be okay when she found him.

So nothing else mattered. Right?

And that would fix things. Wouldn’t it?

They rest on her bunk in space and look out the window.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Jemma whispers. She doesn’t want to imagine her life without her.

“There’s nowhere I’d rather be.” Daisy feels the same.

And whatever the word is that describes what they are, if it is friend, if it is sister, if it is something else entirely, all they know is, it is enough. As long as they are in each other’s lives, as long as they have each other, in whatever way that looks like. There is nothing more precious. Nothing they could do that would ever tear them apart.

Jemma thought she understood love. She followed all the rules. She did everything right. But when her daughter is born, Jemma realizes everything she knew about love was just the surface. Love is creation. It is building. Building a better world. A world where her child can be happy and free and whoever they want to be.

When Jemma’s daughter is born, she names her Alya. Because one of the meanings of Alya is sky. So Jemma names her daughter after the stars in her dreams and she names her after Skye.

Jemma tells her stories of a princess. A girl who shines so vibrantly that none of the colors can capture her. Who feels so boldly and loves so fiercely that the wind itself is blown away by her. Whose soul is so complex that none of the words contain her. Jemma tells her about memories that buried themselves so deeply that sometimes it feels like she is there with them between the stars.

Memories are a strange thing. Jemma has studied them her whole life and all she really knows is that they are both incredibly delicate and easy to lose, and undeniably resilient and possible to recover. Some trace of them has a way of remaining. Because memories don’t just exist in the past. They aren’t sequestered away in the hippocampus. They spread throughout the cortex, throughout the motor system, throughout our emotions and our amygdala. They rest in the spaces between neurons. In the connections we form and the ways we learn. Memories live in our genetics, when the environment changes us so significantly that it leaves behind a marker that modifies our histones, altering our very DNA. And memories can be passed down in this way, from parent to child.

So Jemma should have known better really, than to think hers could ever be contained or suppressed. She has been trying to do this her entire life, but some memories are felt too deeply to ever go away completely. And Jemma can feel them like a part of her, torn away, missing, but still there, familiar, safe, and waiting to be found. A name rings in her heart like the chorus of a song she has been hearing her entire life.

Alya. Alya. Alya.

Daisy never thought she would understand love. She’s always had so much, filling her heart to such an uncomfortable degree. Until she had to leave because if she gave away her heart again only for it to get broken she would not have gotten it back. And she thought, that must be it, love was giving away pieces of yourself.

But it turns out, that wasn’t quite right. That wasn’t the whole story.

Daisy meets a girl and she falls in love. She is so, so precious.

“Auntie Daisy!” she calls out excitedly. She is so happy to meet her. Daisy beams.

Later, Jemma explains to her Alya’s name, and Daisy understands.

Love is a gift.

Once upon at time there was a princess who lived in the sky.

She has a music box that holds only beautiful sounds that she dances to. She is wrapped in the softest blanket that her mother can find and when she gets older she wears it like a cape. She runs with curiosity that cannot be satisfied or contained. She is tiny. And she takes up so much space. Her voice bounces brightly through rooms filled with joy.

And she could grow up to be a biologist or an engineer or a hacker or a dancer or a mechanic or a teacher. She could grow up to be a mother or a wife. She could grow to be all of these things. She could grow to be none of them. And whoever she grows to be, she will always be loved and she will always know it.

And she will leave behind the pages of the book and write her own story.

Jemma Anne Simmons is 36 years old and happy.

She has a husband she loves, and daughter she adores, and a best friend who she never wants to live her life without. She is a scientist. She is a dreamer. She is a thinker and a doer. She is whole and complete. And the funny thing is, she has been this entire time. Even though no one ever told her that. It was an unspoken rule, that she is not supposed to know this. But she has learned by now which rules are worth breaking.

Daisy Louise Johnson is 31 years old and happy.

She has a new family now, too. She has a partner, and a sister, and still she has a best friend who she will always hold on to. She is a hacker. She is a superhero. She is an explorer and an adventurer. She is safe and loved in her home that she built. She is whole and complete. As she always has been. And when they try to tell her that she is not, she knows they are wrong.

Jemma smiles at Daisy and winks. Daisy smiles back.

It is not the two of them against the world anymore, and in fact, it never will be again. But that’s okay. That’s good. Their hearts are full and they grow to make space for more. And still, in the end, it is the two of them, always.

And so they live happily.

**Author's Note:**

> I never thought I would need citations for a fanfic but here we are lol. I copied directly from these sources so the credit is all theirs:  
> Sato, N., Yoshitomi, T., & Mori-Moriyama, N. (2020). Characterization and biosynthesis of lipids in Paulinella micropora MYN1: evidence for efficient integration of chromatophores into cellular lipid metabolism. Plant and Cell Physiology, 61(5), 869-881.  
> Yiu, A. P., Rashid, A. J., & Josselyn, S. A. (2011). Increasing CREB function in the CA1 region of dorsal hippocampus rescues the spatial memory deficits in a mouse model of Alzheimer's disease. Neuropsychopharmacology, 36(11), 2169-2186.  
> ‘How the Best Hackers Learn Their Craft’ - RSA Conference (on youtube)  
> Also referenced: ‘Where the Sidewalk Ends’ by Shel Silverstein and ‘Hold It Together’ by JP Saxe
> 
> Thank you for reading!


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